i actually am looking forward to the fight for the podium. For whatever reason watching Froome bores me even though he's obviously the strongest at the tour. It will be fun to watch the others duke it out. I think we can expect Rodriguez to try some serious mountain attacks that they might let go since he's five minutes back. Contador would be wise to grab his wheel as he blows by.

teams with a second guy in good GC should use them on the attack early to isolate froome. movistar, saxo, belkin need to take the reigns and make a race. time to throw caution to the wind. the tour has been boring since the 80's. guys just won't take a chance for fear of a bad day. otherwise, sky will keep it all together and Froome will beat them up the last climb of the day. That is the recipe for the team with the strongest rider. to beat him you MUST take chances. GC guys don't have it in them anymore to realize 2nd place is the first loser.

Contador already has won Le Tour. He should go on an early flyer and take, dare I say it...Andy Schleck with him or something. Maybe Purito. The Spaniards tend to stick together, Valverde being the exception as he is looking at his best finish ever and has to protect his 2nd. The directors need to have a pow-wow and get something poppin'.

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It is his word versus ours. We like our word. We like where we stand and we like our credibility."--Lance Armstrong.

I don't think they will be able to isolate Froome. Porte will be right there until the end for the rest of the race. It will take multiple suicide attacks from far out to make any real change, and probably multiple people.

I remember the days of several riders/teams banding together to crack the GC leader and get them out of contention; then they would go back to fighting it out amongst themselves. Robert Millar's blog today on Cyclingnews made this same point. There's enough proficient climbers in the peloton that if the right teams got on the same page, they could do some damage. Several Sky riders are already on the ropes, so to speak, so Sunday (I think that was the latest mountain stage) would have been the time to keep on driving nails into Froome's coffin.Maybe this style of riding was/is only possible if you're on the juice, or is it the newer crop of guys just don't have the killer instinct?

And in response to KR about Laiseka - True, he was the fastest up the mountain, but also clearly caught lightning in a bottle. I mean, he had three career wins? All the other guys on that list perfom(ed) day in and day out like aliens. And they made racing boring. And that might be most fans main gripe about doping and dopers - it is not exciting.